Kirito was finally able to free Asuna in Alfheim Online on this day, January 22, 2025, in Episode 24 of Sword Art Online Season 1. This particular event was important for the entire Sword Art Online series as it had Asuna finally waking up after 2 years following the SAO incident, 2 months later than the other SAO victims due to Sugo Nobuyuki’s experiment on human brains.
Last year, on November 7, 2024, the franchise celebrated Kirito’s game completion on the same day it happened in-game.
The first season of Sword Art Online debuted in 2012, and the second season followed in 2014. In 2017, Sword Art Online: Ordinal Scale, an anime film featuring enhanced animation, marked the franchise’s comeback. Sword Art Online: Alicization then followed in 2018, and Sword Art Online: Alicization -War of Underworld came in 2019. The anime is streaming on Crunchyroll.
Sword Art Online: Aria of a Starless Night, a spin-off anime movie, premiered in Japanese cinemas in 2021, with the Sword Art Online: Scherzo of the Deep Night movie premiering a year later in 2022.
Sword Art Online is a light novel series by Reki Kawahara. ASCII Media Works has been publishing it with abec’s illustrations since 2009, and it currently has 28 volumes with more than 30 million copies in circulation. Yen Press is serializing the original light novel series in English and describes the synopsis as:
In the year 2022, gamers rejoice as Sword Art Online – a VRMMORPG (Virtual Reality Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) like no other – debuts, allowing players to take full advantage of the ultimate in gaming technology: NerveGear, a system that allows users to completely immerse themselves in a wholly realistic gaming experience. But when the game goes live, the elation of the players quickly turns to horror as they discover that, for all its amazing features, SAO is missing one of the most basic functions of any MMORPG – a log-out button. Now trapped in the virtual world of Aincrad, their bodies held captive by NerveGear in the real world, users are issued a chilling ultimatum: conquer all one hundred floors of Aincrad to regain your freedom. But in the warped world of SAO, “game over” means certain death – both virtual and real…
© Reki Kawahara / ASCII Media Works / SAO Project
The comments are temporarily unavailable for maintenance.